Twist Point
by A. Keller
Summary: He reloaded and listened to the sirens growing in volume. Arthur breathed for a moment, formulating a plan of attack, when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone yanking open the safe door. Someone else was taking the idea. *Nightmarers. CH2 IS UP!
1. Someone Else

**Disclaimer:** I **do not** own any part of the _Inception_ plot or characters. The only one I can claim is my own Daneda Marlett.

A dark city street after heavy rains.

Traffic lights flashed red for the few cars which, at such a late hour, passed vacantly through. Although closed, the red and yellow lighted shop signs glowed in the glistening blackness, casting pooly reflections on the wet asphalt. There was very little noise, only the faint, ghostly rushing of cars many blocks away. A figure stepped out of an alley.

He was a reasonably handsome man, tall, thin, clad in a well-fitted blue-gray suit. He carried a silenced black handgun with both hands. Vague colors from the washed reflections of light danced across the gleaming black barrel. His hair was perfectly slicked back; his expression blank and focused. Looking for something.

He rounded the corner and peered into the blackened window of a hardware store as if expecting to see something. Then, lowering the gun, he retrieved a small, circular metal object from his pocket and suctioned it to the glass. Just as his hand moved to activate the device, a voice hissed at him from across the street.

"Arthur!"

The man's eyebrows rose slightly in surprise and he lifted his head to peer around him. There was no one on the street.

"Arthur!" The hiss came again. "Over here."

Squinting into the alley it came from, he replied,

"Ariadne? What?"

The smooth face of a small, brown-haired young woman poked out from the blackness. "Of course it's me," she whispered feverishly, glancing from side to side. "Don't do that," she added, nodding her head in the direction of the window.

Arthur looked puzzled, and for a moment his cool, expressionless face showed signs of irritation. "Why not?"

Ariadne leaned forward to throw her voice across the wet street. "Because, it's the wrong store. It's the next one over."

"Oh."

It was a robbery of sorts, everyone involved was aware of that. Cobb had taught them robbery. This kind, though, was different — important, even — different from any other crime on the planet. For Arthur, Ariadne, Eames, Yusuf and the others, the only kind of robbery worth the trouble involved sitting still, hooked up to a device, fast asleep. Inside the world of imagination, of dreams. A robbery of the mind.

But Dom Cobb was through with the business, through with dreaming, through with that sort of life. They almost stopped when he did. The group broke off, scattered to their respective places — no one saw each other for nearly a year. Of course, Arthur was the first to bring it back up. He couldn't stand being without the urgency, without the rush, without that fascinating link to the topsy-turvy dream world. He especially missed the levels Ariadne created. One in particular — a beachside city, he thought — had stuck with him ever since it bloomed inside his mind. It was like one of those dreams you never want to lose the image of.

Ariadne jumped right on the opportunity as soon as Arthur mentioned it, too. They were able to pull off a grand total of two jobs before they began to ask for help, and only because both of those jobs involved generally simple extraction. They called up old friends. Eames, modestly, declared that he was up for it, and Yusuf shrugged and said simply, "Why not?"

Chemist, Forger, Architect, Point Man — no Cobb. To an extent it felt very empty.

But they were back.

This job added slightly more complexity to the extraction. The subject was a psychologist, actually, specializing in dream-based mental disorders. Her name was Dr. Laura Fiske.

"Doesn't sound like a big deal," Arthur had said as the group discussed their mission. "She probably thinks doing what we do is impossible."

At first, it was true. None of them considered Fiske's subconscious a threat. They were mostly just a bit apprehensive about the fact that the extraction was taking place in someone so closely linked to their field. A dream specialist.

Then Eames had laughed. "She's probably well _prepared_ for what we do, actually," he said, giving Arthur a look of warning disbelief. "S'probably had her subconscious trained to blow the daylight out of us."

Eames was spot-on.

Arthur had just escaped a large horde of Fiske's projected bodyguards, thanks to a shortcut in Ariadne's labyrinth city, and had arrived at the seemingly harmless spot where the idea was to be stolen. It wasn't a hardware store, after all; it was a record shop.

Arthur applied a pair of the circular glass-cutters to a new window and watched them etch a precise opening in the glass. They were perfectly synchronized, he thought, like this kick had to be. He knew that outside this dream of a dark street, he was actually sitting in a musty-smelling office with a string tied to the back of his chair. Ariadne and Eames were on the same system. The chairs were set on a timer which, if they worked quickly, would tip them over as soon as they had retrieved the idea. Arthur bent over and stepped into the dark shop. He could barely see the gleam of a metal box in the very back, and began to advance, cautiously, toward it.

"What are you doing?"

He turned with a start, stiffly pointing his gun in the direction of the disturbance. Through the window he saw the silhouette of the subject, solid and spectacled, peering at him through the darkness. The gun's barrel gleamed as it caught the light, and Dr. Fiske stepped back.

Arthur lost view of her as she turned and sprinted away from the window, whisking out her cell phone and punching 911. He caught pieces of her frantic words as she fled down the street. "Robbery... record store... –fifth street..."

He heard police sirens in the distance almost immediately. "Shit," he breathed. He turned and sprinted toward the safe, nearly tripping over the CD racks multiple times. The sirens climbed closer. His brow wrinkling with focus and frustration, he tapped in the code Eames had tricked out of Dr. Fiske. He was perpetually glancing over his shoulder now. The sirens were closing in. Suddenly, a bright spark from a ricocheting bullet pinged off the top of the safe.

Arthur leapt back and, retrieving a larger gun from a strap on his back, fired erratically into the black from which the shot came.

Which happened to be from within the store.

He ducked beneath a long rack of CDs. No backup. Ariadne must have been with Eames. He reloaded his gun and listened to the sirens growing in volume. Other than that, silence fell on the dark shop. Arthur breathed for a moment, formulating a plan of attack, when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone yanking open the safe door.

Someone else was taking the idea.

Arthur jumped. Incredulous, he popped up his head to see who it was.

Blue and white lights flashed across the street now. The flashes illuminated the shop fitfully like a damaged strobe, and Arthur was able to catch a momentary glimpse of the willowy figure trying to stuff a stack of papers into a charcoal trench coat. A thin, white pillowcase of a mask was draped over the figure's face. His expression hardening again, Arthur leapt up from behind the CD rack and raised his weapon to fire.

A spray of synchronized bullets shattered through the store's windows like a wide, riveted wall. Arthur dropped to his stomach and covered his head. The shots cracked against the concrete walls and wooden shelves in every direction. He held his position and waited for the tinkling of glass to settle. Urgent shouts echoed from the street. The strobe continued to flash. Grasping the metal leg of a shelf with his left hand, Arthur swung his body around to aim at the open windows, still lying on his side. From the ground, he fired a steady ribbon of bullets across the entire opening, taking out the entire first line of projections. Gunfire scattered and ricocheted all around.

Then, as if from some silent, automated launcher hidden in the shadows behind him, a round grenade soared through the air toward the police cars. A second of stillness passed. At last, a large and rather disproportionate explosion erupted through the street, heaving waves of heat into the store's windows.

Uncoiling from his defensive position, Arthur army-crawled toward the back of the store. He lifted his head to check the open safe. Everything was gone.

Arthur turned his gaze to the right. It was then, in the light of the blaze left behind by the grenade, that he could clearly make out the tall, thin thief beside him. A sparse, crudely drawn frowning face decorated his/her white mask. He or she wore fitted slacks and carried two pitch black weapons: a silenced pistol (like his own) in the right hand, and a heavy grenade launcher in the left.

He squinted for a split second in disbelief. It looked as if — and he could be mistaken — it was a _woman_.

When he finally looked away and rolled onto his side, he heard the tiny, sharp sound of a single silenced shot. Whoever it was, they had just shot themselves in the head.

Arthur fired a few more sprays of shots toward the windows, then pulled a small microphone that was pinned to his collar up to his mouth.

"Ariadne, Eames, wake yourselves up." His eyes didn't move off the flames outside. "We failed. I'll explain later."

And he brought the handgun to his temple and pulled the trigger.


	2. Daneda

"You're not honestly saying that a _projection_ took the papers, are you?"

The four of them sat around in the leather chairs and sofas of a spacious London apartment. Everything in the room carried the same contemplative burnt-sienna tint, from the cherry-paneled walls to the brown leather loveseat and red Moroccan rug. Earlier that day, they had managed to clear Dr. Fiske's office within just two minutes of her awakening. But they hadn't reached their goal. They had left the old psychologist's office empty-handed and empty-minded.

"No. No, it was..." Arthur squeezed his forehead between his thumb and forefinger and stared at the floor in frustration. "It was some anonymous person in a white mask. It just doesn't make any sense."

"We appreciate your restatement of the obvious, Arthur, but I don't think it's making this go anywhere," Eames said, holding his hands together. Arthur paused in his thought to glare at Eames from beneath his palm.

"Yusuf," said Ariadne, "You didn't see anything up here, did you?"

Yusuf's eyes flitted to the ground, and he hesitated. "Well, I... I didn't _see_ anything, per se..."

All eyes set on him.

"Oh, bloody great!" Eames cried, leaning back in his chair.

"Well, someone must have snuck in and put me under," Yusuf began anxiously. "They didn't hook me up to anything, just came up behind me and put a cloth over my mouth. I couldn't even see their face! They woke me up before leaving, I should think."

"You realize, Yusuf," said Eames gravely, leaning forward with a piercing stare, "That this is a _multi-million dollar job_, hm? We needed that idea, and now we've lost it, thanks to some wonderful toothpick with a bloody sheet over his head."

"I'm sorry! I couldn't stop him!" Yusuf threw up his hands in defense.

"It's fine," Arthur interjected. "Now we just have to find this person and get it back. Our employers gave us two weeks to do this. It's been three days. We've got time."

"But where do we even start?" Said Ariadne.

"If our luck is good, they're still here in London," Arthur replied, resting his elbows in his knees and clasping his hands. "We start here. We're going to conduct a wide-range search for every organization in London even remotely related to this field."

Eames tilted his head at Arthur. "How do you suggest we do that? _This field_ is illegal. They won't just have a sign identifying them in the street."

Arthur's mouth twisted into a one-sided smirk. "Use your imagination," he replied.

Two days passed. Together, disguised as potential "employers," they had scoured London right and left, and found nothing. Of course, they always came across the occasional — and sometimes disturbing — place that was a dream-sharer, with small groups of people sound asleep in a dark room, attached my wires to a single machine at the room's center. Whenever they'd come upon one of these dismal places, Arthur and Ariadne would simply walk through, ask a few questions about whether or not the caretaker was involved in extraction, and Ariadne would make an awestruck remark about how fascinating it was and they would be on their way. They consistently ended up with nothing. All of them knew — especially Arthur, who was looking more and more anxious each day — that time was running out. If they could even find the other thief, they would still have to arrange some kind of operation to get the idea back.

That Friday afternoon, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf and Ariadne sat around a small table at an outdoor café, silent. They'd never had to let a job go like this before. By now, one thing seemed certain. Whoever had hijacked the operation was long gone.

Eames finally set down his coffee and said, "Well, chums, it's been a lovely time, but now I think we ought to give up."

Arthur nodded slowly, staring into the depths of his own cup.

Yusuf glanced around. "Sounds right to me."

"What should we tell Cohen?" said Ariadne.

Mr. George Cohen was the man who had called them to the job. He had emphasized this operation's particular urgency, stressing that he had hired them as his "best bet." Hw was a squat, bald, worried-looking man, with thick fingers and a large nose, always with his mouth shut tightly. Cohen never happened to mention the nature of what they were extracting — only that it would be easy to find. He'd also never said anything about multiple teams going after it. So what happened now that they'd failed?

"We tell him that some other blokes got there first," Eames replied, lifting his coffee back up to his lips. "Unless you've got a better idea, Arthur?"

Arthur continued to stare at his coffee with one arm outstretched to the table. He played with his red-and-white loaded die between his fingers. "There has to be something we missed," he said without looking up. "I don't think Cobb would have written something like this off without at least trying to dig deeper."

"This _would_ be a little easier if Cobb was around," Ariadne agreed.

So they packed. That night, quieter than ever, the team sat around their auburn-plastered apartment and arranged their things. They were to head back to Washington, D.C., where they would meet with Mr. Cohen and tell him the stinging news — someone else got there first.

Arthur was the most disquieted of them all. Late into the night, while the others slept, he sat on the edge of the fold-out couch with his suit unbuttoned and tie hanging loose, staring at his clasped hands in puzzled reflection. Who else was after Dr. Fiske's secrets? And why? Then he remembered — Cohen never said why _he_ was, either. How did this new extractor take the information by simply stuffing imaginary papers in his or her jacket? Then, there was the other unnerving question. The masked, vanished extractor had entered a labyrinth _Ariadne_ created. And he or she entered it alone. How, then, was he or she able to reach the safe so seamlessly, and even before Arthur did?

It was mind-bending. It seemed impossible.

Arthur eventually undressed and pulled himself into the creaking white cot. After flicking out the lamp, he lay on his back, closed his eyes, and fantasized about a natural, dream-filled sleep.

Morning. The team now stood in a crowded taxi queue, shaking off the dewy morning air in their jackets. Arthur held his red die in his left hand. They all carried their briefcases full of equipment, except for Ariadne, who stood at Arthur's side with her arms crossed.

Finally, after a few minutes of dreadful silence, Ariadne sighed loudly and said,

"This is really crazy. We shouldn't be doing this."

Arthur raised his eyebrows and looked over at her. "You mean leaving?"

"Yeah," she replied, turning to face him. "We didn't even finish our whole search. Don't you guys realize that? How do you think we'll ever know they're gone if we haven't looked absolutely everywhere?"

"London is e_nor_mous, love," Eames cut in. "Do you really think we'll be able to find him?"

"Well, I..."

"I think she's right." Arthur faced Ariadne. "It's worth a try. And if we can last one more day..."

He stopped. His eyes were fixed behind Ariadne's head, down the street. After a split second of silent staring, Arthur held out his briefcase to Ariadne, and, without taking his eyes off the distance, said,

"Hold this." And walked off in the direction of whatever he'd spotted.

Without breaking his pace, Arthur bumped and sidled through the current of the crowd, his path straight and deliberate. He kept his gaze fixed on the same point. Eventually, he began to slow his steps. After pushing through a large crowd of tourists, Arthur dropped his eyes, sidestepped and stopped against the brick wall of an old pub. When his eyes rose again, briefly, they confirmed his target.

A group of schoolchildren, all dressed in matching green cotton t-shirts, had congregated at the street corner across from the British Museum. They all appeared to be grade-school students, talking and laughing, joking amongst themselves. They were all British. But it wasn't the children who had caught Arthur's attention. It was their chaperone, a tall, dark-brown-haired woman speaking with an American accent. She was heavily sunburned across her nose and cheeks and wore a black pencil skirt with a blue blouse. And she had the same, unforgettably wiry, gangly physique of the masked extractor they were searching for.

Arthur stood by the wall of the pub for a few minutes, still a safe distance away. He studied the woman's movements carefully. Then, casually unfolding his arms, he crossed the narrow street, walked about 50 yards parallel to the group of schoolchildren, and crossed twice more, an incomplete square. Once he had reached the right sidewalk, he fitted his hands in his pockets and began to stroll toward the group.

The woman had leaned down to talk to one of her students and was standing up with a smile. As her eyes flickered up she saw Arthur.

Her smile faded immediately. Disbelief replaced it. She glanced off to the side in terror, as if searching for help, then turned back to see if he had been real.

He was gone.

The dark-haired woman stared quietly, her eyes open wide. The rest of the street showed no trace of him All tourists and Londoners.

Eyes falling to the cobblestone, the woman fished a hand into her blouse and retrieved a brass compass attached to a small lanyard. She examined it for only a few seconds before tucking it back inside her collar. It seemed her students had lost all interest in her by now — they noticed none of this.

Then she saw it — the opening of an alley on the sidewalk where she had seen Arthur. Her lanky frame stiffened. Should she check? She could have just been seeing things. Then again, the children could be in danger. She just needed a look — proof that it had been just an illusion. She leaned over to warn her group, cheerfully, that she would be right back.

She stepped cautiously in the direction of the alley, making a conscious attempt to keep her steps quiet and inconspicuous — it wouldn't be favorable to attract attention. She finally reached the opening and stopped. The dark-haired woman paused. Then, eyes hardening, she inhaled quickly and craned her neck slightly to bring the alley into vision.

Arthur clapped a hand over her mouth and pulled her in.

Moving behind a dumpster and pushing her rather gently against the brick, he locked his eyes on her own.

"What did you do with it?" he whispered sharply.

His hand moved off her mouth. By now her lips had pressed into a hard line, and her brown twitched momentarily.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

Arthur's expression held, determined. "Don't tell me you didn't recognize me over there. I identified you right away. That mask didn't do what it should have." The woman tightened up knowingly. "So," he continued, "Why did you drug our chemist to get into the mind of Dr. Laura Fiske?"

She said nothing at first. Just stared back at Arthur, her mouth still in that line and her nostrils flaring out.

"This is not the time for this," she finally whispered.

"What did you do with the papers?" Arthur hissed.

"This is not the time," she repeated.

Arthur grabbed the silenced handgun from the back of his trousers and pressed the barrel into her hip, moving closer and hiding the weapon with his jacket. Unbelievably, no-one had walked by for several minutes.

"_Where is the information we need_?"

The woman's eyes narrowed. She scowled deeply at Arthur and sighed.

"It's hidden," she said. "Near the center of London."

Arthur nodded, his expression stolid and unwavering. "That's more like it," he said.

He made the dark-haired woman call in sick with the excuse that she had left her group to use the bathroom and ended up very ill. Her voice barely wavered at all on the phone, so the supervisor complied and said, dumbly, that a replacement was being sent out to meet her. Arthur knew she wouldn't try anything funny — in exposing him, she would also be at risk of exposing herself.

Arthur remained hidden as the replacement —a stout, red-headed Brit — arrived and bid the dark-haired American farewell. Just as expected, neither the children nor the replacement showed any signs of suspicion. Then, taking the same wide loop around the streets as before, Arthur met up with his captive in front of a bank. They continued in silence; the woman's eyes stayed firmly focused of the ground.

"You're a teacher?" Arthur asked suddenly. He didn't turn to look at her.

The woman looked away. "Yes," she said. "I try to have this sort of normal living on the side, as you apparently don't." She pulled at the sleeve of her blouse. "You're an extractor?" She shot back.

The beginnings of a sarcastic smile passed over Arthur's face. "I am now," he replied. "But I've been in the business for a long time. Still, I've never come across a threat quite like you.

The dark-haired woman, still walking, actually turned to look at him for once. "I'm not exactly a projection, am I?" She asked dryly.

"No." Arthur looked right and they crossed the street. "But I wouldn't start thinking your team is going to get in our way. We're good at what we do."

The woman glanced at Arthur out of the corner of her eye in utter disgust. She turned away and stared at the pavement again, brooding.

Arthur spotted the other up the street, and Eames nodded in acknowledgement.

"I'm going to need to know your name," Arthur said to his prisoner.

"June," she replied quickly.

They approached the taxi queue where Eames, Ariadne and Yusuf stood staring. Ariadne handed Arthur his briefcase.

Eames' eyebrows rose. "Lovely time to pick out a girlfriend, chap."

Arthur ignored the comment and gripped his captive's arm firmly. "This," he said, "is June. She has what we need, and she's going to tell us where to find it." She tried to shrug off his hand disgustedly, but to no avail.

Ariadne watched the taller woman worriedly. "Arthur..." She began, eyes round and sympathetic. "... are you sure?"

Arthur looked down at Ariadne as June's head turned away.

"Definitely."

A taxi showed up and delivered the group, instead of to the airport, back to their apartment a few blocks away. The London morning was beginning to melt off the cityscape; damp, rosy air gave way to the murky gray of an English afternoon. The sky was decorated with its stereotypical carpet of blue-gray clouds. Once inside the suite, they promptly locked the door and closed the shades. The room's copper tones seemed to interrogate June already.

"Why did you bring me here?" She asked with courage and defiance. Her face had stubborn frustration chiseled into it. Her bottom lip pulled up slightly, and her nostrils hadn't lost their flare since she had first met Arthur. Even now, as she sat in an unfamiliar, overbearingly red apartment with three dangerous looking men (maybe except for Yusuf, the dark, round one with curly black hair) and one surprisingly sweet-looking young woman, June looked ready to preserve her power and dignity. She sat stiffly in a Victorian-style chair as the others watched from various spots throughout the room.

"It seems that, with you, we've come across a bit of a situation, that's all," Eames replied.

"Eight," Arthur added. He still refused to sit down, and now he stood partially behind Eames' chair, his hands sunk in his pockets. "Since there seems to be another team going after what we are, we need to know who you're working with."

"Why?" June snapped.

"I can't really tell you," said Arthur. "It's not the idea."

"Please tell us," Eames said.

June looked at the opposite wall and scowled. "I don't have any last names." She spoke in a dull monotone. "But here they are: Tom, Brock, and David."

"You have _got_ to do better than that, darling!" Eames cried, almost immediately. "You're obviously not your team's forger, are you? Ghastly liar."

June scowled deeper. She said nothing.

"Come on," Eames insisted.

"I thought," she said finally, after a long silence, "that I was in the extraction business, not the mob."

They all stared flatly at her.

"June," said Ariadne, "this isn't going to go anywhere if you try to argue with us. It's going to be the same either way." Although her words were still sharp, her tone was a bit softer than the others'. Her eyes wandered curiously over the new extractor's face. "Just tell us."

The dark-haired woman's scowl faded, and her expression went blank. She'd lost.

"My name is Daneda," she said.

Eames eyed Arthur cynically, with a look that said, 'congratulations for missing the lie about her name.'

"That's a good start," Eames responded, chuckling.

Daneda retained her stiff posture. "I'm not the forger on my team, like you so kindly identified. I'm the extractor. That's all. When you saw me I wasn't with the group, I was by myself. Sometimes I do that. Luckily, in your case, you already had an architect."

"But how did you get there before Arthur?" Ariadne said. "It was a labyrinth. You never even knew the layout."

Daneda turned to look at Arthur. "Arthur. Alright. Well, unfortunately that," her eyes fell. "Is something I won't explain."

She looked around the room suddenly, spending an especially long time on the ceiling. She then stopped, glanced down coolly, and continued.

"As it turns out, my colleagues' names are not particularly important anymore. I'll be leaving soon."

The others squinted at her in disbelief. But a slow, barely-visible gas had begun to fall through the apartment's vents toward them. Arthur whirled around and saw that Yusuf was asleep — or unconscious — on the floor behind him. When Arthur turned around, jerkily, at was just in time to see Daneda bolt up from her chair and run to the door, slipping a small gas mask over her nose and mouth.

Ariadne fell. Arthur grabbed a cloth out of his pocket, threw it over his face, and sprinted after the prisoner.

She grabbed frantically at the doorknob with her free hand and rattled it desperately, forgetting for a moment that it was locked. Arthur tore across the room, bounding over the leather loveseat and knocking over a lamp on a nearby coffee table. In a split second, the lamp crashed to the floor, Daneda reached for the lock, and Arthur caught up to her. He wrenched her hand away from the door, grabbing both of her arms and yanking her back into the room before she could get it open. With one of his hands, he pulled the gas mask away from her face. In the midst of all the struggling, he had lost his facecloth as well. Daneda thrashed wildly and tried to resist. But, Arthur figured, that was one thing her thin, gangly figure was not cut out for.

By the time they reached the sitting area both of them had inhaled too much of the gas. The jostling stopped, and they stumbled for a moment. Then, falling softly to the Moroccan carpet, both extractors surrendered and fell into a deep, dark sleep.


	3. Nightmares

The night in London was as brisk and biting as the day. Arthur reached down and zipped up his brown leather jacket in the dark. A streetlight was up ahead. He reached it, and, worrying, pulled out his cell phone for the second time and dialed Ariadne's number. Nothing but empty ringing greeted him, followed by the automated cheerfulness of her voicemail recording.

_Hi, this is Ariadne, I can't come to the phone right now, so please leave a message and I'll call you back. Thanks!_

_Beep_.

He flipped the phone shut and bit down anxiously. He stood at the edge of a dirty cosmopolitan street, littered from corner to corner with softly glowing neon signs and smokers and prostitutes and people sitting out in their coats with beers, talking loudly about personal things. Not exactly the place Arthur wanted to be. But he had nowhere else he could think of going — not while he had lost track of Yusuf, Ariadne, and Eames. He had to find them first.

His eyes settled for a moment on a gruff, loud-laughing drunk across the street to the left. Then a block of white in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flit right.

Arthur started in shock.

Standing there, beneath the streetlight directly opposite him, was a tall, thin figure in a dark trench coat, a ghostly white mask over its head.

Staggering backward a little, Arthur turned away and drove his hand into his pocket, fumbling around for his totem. He retrieved it and shook it in its palm. After a few seconds, his arm slowed and stopped, and he put the red die back into his pocket.

He walked.

The figure's sightless, hand-drawn face watched him pace down the dark sidewalk, then turned to move. When Arthur glanced over his shoulder there was nothing beneath the lamp but the pavement. He turned back around.

The white-masked figure was right in front of his eyes.

Unarmed and afraid to fight because of the crowds, he stepped back and turned around — only to see another two masked figures, one in a navy coat and one in brown, coming toward him. He spun around to face the thin figure again.

"Daneda," he growled.

The other two stopped behind him. The entire group of patrons seated outside a nearby bar also went silent and stared. Arthur looked into the limp white mask over Daneda's face.

"I was wondering when you'd pick up on it," she said. "Couldn't remember how you got here?"

Some of the bar-goers behind them were standing slowly up. "No," said Arthur. "I saw you." She said nothing. "Why did you bring me here?" He added.

"Not just you," came a man's voice from behind Arthur. One of the masked men. "All of you. But you don't have to be here. Tell us who _you_ work for, and we'll wake you all up."

The bar-goers were walking toward the scene. "Steevo," Daneda said.

The brown-coated masked man glanced over his shoulder. "Anything, Mr. Arthur?"

Daneda pressed the barrel of her pistol against his arm. Arthur didn't reply. He smirked.

"Looks like those projections are looking for the dreamer," he said.

He was right. A large crowd was moving toward them, focused and silent.

"_Steevo_!"

"Let's move," said the man in the brown coat. He walked briskly at Arthur and grabbed his arm, while Daneda turned and grabbed the other, and they rushed into the street in the opposite direction of the projections. The crowd followed menacingly. Daneda and her associates hurried Arthur into a condemned building, kicked down the door, and bolted up the stairs.

They threw Arthur to the creaking, dust-covered floor. Daneda and the brown-coated man had pointed their weapons at each of Arthur's knees.

"The pressure's on you now," Daneda said. Although harsh, her tone was actually wavering in fear. "Give us the name. Who do you work for?"

The masked man in the black jacket noticed her trembling voice. "Daneda, it's fine. We haven't reached the Point yet. H designed this."

Arthur still would not answer his question. He watched the team converse.

"We're not going to be able to control it," Daneda said shakily. "This one's already changing on its own. _This_ building _wasn't_ in H's design."

Both masked men looked quickly around the old, rotted room in which they stood.

"Dammit," the black-jacketed one hissed after a brief silence.

There was a sudden rumble beneath the floor. Arthur blinked. Suddenly the wall to his right was black. It began to melt as if made of wax.

"We are _not_ prepared to hit it this early," the brown-coated man said, and turned to Arthur, who was staring at the melting black wall. "Tell us the name!" He yelled.

But then the entire room turned black. The masked group's weapons crumbled out of their hands like sand. A pair of spiked pillars — like huge nails — shot from the ceiling and penetrated through the floor on either side of Arthur's body, and then the floor was soft, and he was falling backward, dark and fast. As he fell, out of sheer confusion and fear, he shouted the name _George Cohen_.

Arthur opened his eyes. He lay on his back on the Moroccan rug in the team's London apartment. He reached over and touched the PASIV wires hooked up to his wrist. In his peripheral vision he noticed two men sitting in chairs on his left and right. As he propped himself up on his elbows, Arthur saw — sitting on the sofa, hands clasped and head down — Daneda.

"Why didn't you get out while you could?" was the first thing he said, glaring with hatred into her mask-less, sun-burnt face.

She looked up. There was something strikingly different in her expression now. It was no longer infuriated, suspicious or terrified. Her eyes stared at him softly, blankly, glazed. Her mouth was loosely shut.

"We didn't hear what we wanted to," she said quietly. Arthur turned briefly to look at the men seated on either side of him. To his left was a young-looking, pale blond, eyes turned down in thought. A broad-shouldered, Asian-looking man watched him from the right.

"What?" Arthur pressed.

"You said you work for George Cohen," said the blond.

"You know him?" said Arthur.

"Know him!" laughed the blond man. "He hired us for this job."

Arthur stared.

"I don't believe you," he said. "He hired _us_."

Daneda shrugged. "You must," she said.

Arthur fished in his pocket and retrieved the red loaded die, setting it on the rug. He tapped it with his finger and it fell over. He gazed blankly into the bottom of the sofa.

"Where is the rest of my team?"

"Asleep," said the blond. "They'll wake up soon, but they probably won't be happy."

A long silence crept over the group. Faintly, in the background hummed the low, pulsating drone of the PASIV, still hooked up to Ariadne, Eames and Yusuf, who lay on the floor behind the sofa. None in the conscious group looked up at one another. A certain wall of mystery had broken down between them, but now a new one rose up. If Arthur was to believe them, then what had he been put up to?

"If it's any help, it's hard for us to trust you, either," Daneda said. "But we would have absolutely left before you woke up if the circumstances weren't so strange — or if we believed you were lying. But what you said back there was straight out of—"

"Just cold, complete fear," the Asian-American man finished excitedly. "Perfect Fear, it's called. We see it all the time. It's one of the best truth serums there is."

Arthur chuckled snidely, embarrassed. "You think I was that afraid?"

Daneda restrained a mocking grin. "Well, Perfect Fear is a great tool because the Mark usually can't gauge how afraid he or she actually is."

There was a short pause. "You certainly cover a different field of extraction," Arthur said.

"We do," said the blond. "But we're not going to tell you any more about us until we have your word. So, do we?"

Arthur heard shifting behind the sofa. He looked around at each member of the new team.

"Alright," he said.

Just as he was saying this, a loud gasp — unmistakably Ariadne's — sounded from behind the couch. Daneda turned and leaned over the back to look at her.

"Sorry about that," she said quickly, reaching down for the wires on Ariadne's wrist. A loud slapping sound caused Daneda to leap back in shock. "Hey!— "

Ariadne's head popped raggedly up from behind the sofa. Her face was streaked with lines of tears and mascara. Red-rimmed eyes settled on Arthur.

"What the _hell_ was that?" She cried. Daneda stared guiltily. "A-Arthur... what... why are they still here? Wh..."

Arthur glared at Daneda. "Well, we _did_ just make a truce," he replied. "But I'm not so sure I want to honor it anymore." He stole a glance back at Ariadne's panic. "What happened to her?"

"She got trapped inside a nightmare," said Daneda. "We didn't mean it to turn out that way..."

"But that... that was unlike anything I've ever created," Ariadne spluttered. "It had no... shape — and the projections... the projections were unbelievable."

"We were about to tell Arthur: that's what we specialize in," the blond man said, a hint of sympathy in his voice. "What you just experienced was an Amorphous Nightmare. At a certain point the balance of the dream shifts, and we are no longer under control. This one shifted earlier than we expected, so we couldn't do anything with it."

Ariadne's head sank, and she shivered. "Arthur made a truce with you?"

Eames's body rose to its feet from behind Ariadne. He was sweating. "What's all this, then, go on with it," he half-murmured.

"Cohen put two teams on this job without telling us," Arthur stated bluntly. "These guys are the other team."

"Bloody hell," Eames mumbled, eyes staring into nothing.

It was then that Arthur noticed a third figure standing up to Eames' left — someone he didn't recognize. This man had curly, side-parted brown hair and a coarse, unprofessional chinstrap beard across his jaw. His eyes wandered around the figures before him, sharp, hard, with an unusually powerful sense of focus. He rubbed his tanned neck and walked over to lean on the sofa beside Daneda.

"Sorry, I got stuck," he said in a familiar voice. The man in the brown coat.

Daneda shrugged. Yusuf stood groggily up beside Ariadne. "Turned out fine," Daneda said. "Steevo, we just became allies with these guys."

Steevo stared with his glaring eyes. "Ok. Why?"

"Our employer screwed us over," said the blond man. "Mr. Cohen put both of us on the same job."

"Arthur, and your team, this is Steevo." Daneda tugged on the man's sleeve. "Over there is Harrison," a hand-wave at the Asian-American man, "and that's Cory." The blond man nodded and crossed his arms.

Arthur stood up from his comfortable sitting position. "Ok," he replied. "This is Yusuf, Ariadne, Eames."

There was a short pause. Now what?

Finally, Eames, shifting his weight and leaning toward the center of the room, folded his arms, grinned slightly, cleared his throat and said,

"Well, what we've got is this utter dilemma that Mr. Cohen deliberately didn't tell us about. In terms of finding out why..." He glanced down at the poker chip he'd retrieved from his pocket, then held it up with his thumb and forefinger, looking up mischievously. "... Why not do that in the best way we know?"


End file.
